Although, Facebook’s primary user base is there to interact with existing connections, we can’t deny the success the network has had with ads. Facebook Graph Search fuels referral converts through search queries like, “Brands my friends like.” Oppositely, if attempting to reach your target audience on Google+, quality content has proven to be most successful.

Learn to be a leader-like relationship builder by doing the following:Establish your credibility. Whenever you consistently make decisions that benefit others you work with or that benefit your organization, you earn people’s trust and respect.Lead through informal authority. Formal titles and positions are shallow sources of authority. Respect, trust and admiration are stronger, more durable currency. Win hearts through sincerity, passion and vision.Talk with people at all levels. Tell them about your plans and hopes for the organization and how they can participate in its success. People will watch how you treat others and how you communicate with them.Live by the Golden Rule. As an old saying goes, “People may not remember what you said or what you did, but they will always remember how you made them feel.” Treat people the way you would want to be treated by them.Listen to people and hear what they say. How do you feel when you know that a person you’re taking to is listening to you? You feel great, so return the favor. Ask people what they think of an issue and then really consider what they have to say.Deliver on your promises. It is crucial that you keep the promises you make to people. On the other hand, if you can no longer keep a commitment that you made, own up to it and let them know why. They may not like your decision, but explaining your reasons lets them know you have integrity.Be seen. Don’t hide behind a desk and communicate by emails or tweets. Effective leaders take time out from their desk-bound responsibilities and connect to people. If your colleagues see you, they will feel connected to you and you will get the best from them.Make the tough decisions. People need to know that there is a leader steering the ship. They need to know that when a tough decision must be made, someone will make it. It is not the leader’s job to make everyone comfortable or popular, but your actions must reflect your core values.

Insights gathered from anonymous visitors can be used to drive contextualized marketing messages. And as time goes on, you learn more and more about your anonymous users via their browsing behavior, the frequency of visits, and what they are interested in, etc. These hundreds of micro-actions should be used to build rich customer profiles, learn about intent, and personal preferences.

In order to effectively use anonymous visitors data for personalization, there are three key requirements that must be met:

Comprehensiveness – Data should be comprehensive and high-quality, collected based on interactions across as many touch-points as possible.Unification – Data sources through multiple channels should be unified and centralized, rather than siloed.Actionability – The platform should allow you to use all available data in real time to influence messaging and targeting.As you collect more data over the course of multiple visits and actions, you can facilitate more relevant and timely personalization. Over time, by connecting, matching, and syncing the contextual data outlined above to anonymous visitor IDs, that large bucket of “unknown unknowns” becomes smaller and smaller.

Let’s Dive in With Some Examples

Personalization Based on Third Party Data

First impressions with a website can make or break potentially lucrative relationships. Providing a welcoming experienced based on contextual data can make a huge difference to unknown visitors.

Regardless of your preference for one kind of feedback over another, and whether you want it or not, everyone receives feedback. The question that interested us was, does having a preference affect what you do with that feedback?

We combined the results from our self-assessment of feedback preferences with 360-degree evaluations of each leader’s effectiveness. The 360-degree assessment used was Zenger Folkman’s The Extraordinary Leader™ survey, which measures 16 competencies that are the key skills leaders need to transition from good managers to great leaders. Combining the data from both assessments gave us 588 leaders for whom we had responses for both assessments. We then broke the feedback preference data down into four groups. The table below shows each of the groups, and the percentage of population in each

This article is the capstone of a 12-part series on Customer-Centered Business: 10 Keys to Organic Growth, which prescribed 4 prerequisites for each of these 10 keys:

1. Goals — Sharing the VisionCustomer experience programs do not add up to “a master plan” or a “plan for directing overall operations and movements”.

Scope Accurately: Span the end-to-end customer life cycle.Identify Stakeholders: Customers plus all parties in your company (plus suppliers and partners).Be Bold: By definition of “end-to-end customer experience” itself, customer-centered business is the universal aim of customer experience strategy.Setup for Success: Corporate strategy and customer experience strategy must be mirror images.2. Values — Walking the TalkCustomers see your company in terms of your people’s behaviors — not just the behaviors of customer-facing people, but everyone who sets and drives policies, processes, and handoffs throughout your company and its broader ecosystem.

Back in the 1950s, Canadian psychiatrist Eric Berne developed a psychoanalytical paradigm called Transactional Analysis. The theory intends to evaluate human behavior at various levels of social transactions. Here, individuals are segmented into different ego states based on their needs and conduct. Different approaches were also defined to attend them suitably.

Transactional Analysis into Customer Satisfaction Avenues

The transactional analysis helps greatly in identifying people’s personalities, standpoints and preferences. This, in turn,assists to make the best out of the proceedings with them, ultimately concentrating on mutual benefits.

Being an adept and classical premise to forecast human behavior and expectations, transactional analysis is adopted in various facets – like family relationships, organizational settings, etc.

Correspondingly, it also serves as a sensible and functional strategy to emanate extensive customer satisfaction in all kinds of businesses.

The Three Tiers of Customer Satisfaction

As mentioned earlier, transactional analysis classifies a person to one of the three ego states, namely:

The parent –They try to have a voice of authority that they’ve learned from external factors.

Wisdom and humility are marks of a true leader, as is transparency. Accumulate enough scars, and there’s no sense trying to hide them. If you do, people will know you’re just covering up. That said, there’s a time and place for everything; you don’t want to bawl in front of the board of directors or blubber at an all-employee meeting. But don’t stuff the emotion. That’s where heart attacks come from.If you’re near tears, there’s a reason, and you need to find a healthy form of release. Leaders who don’t cry either have hearts of stone or are in denial. Neither is good. Get it out and you can get on with it.

A decade after it started, the Great Recession has faded into memory. Corporate earnings and the stock market have fully recovered, with the financial sector thriving. The labor market has fully recovered, with middle-class earnings growing and the economy flirting with full employment. The government, at the state, local, and federal levels, has recovered too, and the economy is growing close to what economists think of as the fastest sustainable pace.

Yet, 10 years after the economy tipped into the deepest contraction of the post–World War II era, the Great Recession’s scars remain, as seen in academic studies and government figures, as well as the testimony of regional business experts and the families that lived through it. The country has rebounded in many ways, but is also more unequal, less vibrant, less productive, poorer, and sicker than it would have been had the crisis been less severe. And the extent of the scarring holds lessons for the politicians and policymakers who will confront the next recession, whenever it hits and however it starts.

Many new leaders silently struggle in their leadership role. They avoid difficult conversations about performance because they do not have the confidence or the skill to coach others or facilitate change. Or, they do not have the critical skills to determine the root problem of poor performance, so their decisions are based on assumptions rather than analytical thinking.These managerial mistakes contribute to a culture of mistrust and disempowerment. Executives can use this short list to determine the root causes of leadership failures within your organization.Failing to develop new leadersAvoiding performance conversationsTaking it personallyMaking assumptionsUsing accountability the wrong wayInadequate development

A good technical worker is not necessarily a born leader. Newly selected leaders often experience an identity crisis due to lack of leadership development. The new leader has not had the time or development necessary to identify with the new role as leader. As a result, this new leader makes rookie mistakes.The first mistake is trying to be everyone’s best friend. The open door soon becomes a revolving door. The end result is the new manager has to work around the clock to get work done, and the employees become co-dependent instead of empowered. The second mistake is laying down the hammer to show who is boss. The end result is a toxic work environment.

More women are working as they approach retirement. The percentage of women age 55-64 in the workforce increased from 53% in 2000 to 59% in 2015, hitting a high of 61% in 2010.There’s a glaring gender gap when it comes to retirement security. In 2013, women were 80 percent more likely than men to face poverty in retirement.Women’s varying backgrounds can impact financial stability in retirement. Factors like age, marital status and race can all impact the financial circumstances of retired women. For example, the gap widens as retirees age: women age 75 to 79 are three times more likely to be impoverished than men.The NIRS, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization, advocates for public policies that strengthen financial security for retired Americans—especially those most susceptible to poverty—like enhancing social security for women and improving state-funded savings programs.

ou’ve heard the phrase, “Mind your Ps and Qs”? Here is a twist on that -- three Ps and three Ds that leaders must pay attention to.These Ps and Ds have a huge impact on the quality of your work culture. Why should you care? Because your work culture drives engagement, service, and results, for better or worse!Culture matters in every organization, whether you have a small team, a huge multinational, or any size or type of organization in between.You’ve seen these Ps and Ds -- and their impact -- in your work cultures over time.The Ps? Purposeful, positive and productive. Effective leaders craft a purposeful, positive, productive work culture with intention and attention.The Ds? Discounting, demeaning and dismissing. There is no faster way to eroding engagement, service, and results in a workplace than by discounting, demeaning or dismissing others’ ideas, efforts, and accomplishments.The challenge is that the three Ds are much more prevalent in our work enviro

Focusing on metrics is key to achieving your desired business results—but it can be difficult to determine which metrics actually matter. There are five major questions you need to answer to ensure the metrics you’re measuring matter and you can take action based upon what they tell you.

Some metrics are easy to put numbers to. Revenue, inventory levels, and customer retention are solid numbers. Knowing those quantitative measures is essential to understanding your business. That said, you also need to measure qualitative aspects of your business like associate engagement and customer satisfaction.

Regardless of the measurement you need to answer five things about it:

1. What’s the measurement’s purpose? Know the significance of the metric and what you’ll change in your business based on the numbers you measure.

2. What data source will you use? Different sources of data can yield different results.

3. How will you calculate the metric? Define a formula, especially for complex measures.

Many new leaders silently struggle in their leadership role. They avoid difficult conversations about performance because they do not have the confidence or the skill to coach others or facilitate change. Or, they do not have the critical skills to determine the root problem of poor performance, so their decisions are based on assumptions rather than analytical thinking.These managerial mistakes contribute to a culture of mistrust and disempowerment. Executives can use this short list to determine the root causes of leadership failures within your organization.Failing to develop new leadersAvoiding performance conversationsTaking it personallyMaking assumptionsUsing accountability the wrong wayInadequate development

A good technical worker is not necessarily a born leader. Newly selected leaders often experience an identity crisis due to lack of leadership development. The new leader has not had the time or development necessary to identify with the new role as leader. As a result, this new leader makes rookie mistakes.

ome bosses like to be in charge. Totally.We call them autocrats.“Companies used to be able to function with autocratic bosses,” wrote Harvard professor and author Rosabeth Moss Kanter. “We don't live in that world anymore.”The fallacy of autocracy is that it is efficient. In reality, it is not. Oh, it may work for a time, but only when the boss is fully engaged and fully in charge. People around the boss derive their authority by their proximity to the boss, not necessarily their ability to get things done. When the boss is away, the organization shuts down.Worse, autocracy is not sustainable, not merely because of the lifespan of the boss but also because all power is centralized.Leadership is nurtured by inclusion -- not because it’s a nice to do but because it’s a must-do. Autocratic bosses bear the weight of the enterprise on their shoulders. While they may entertain outside counsel, the operative word is “entertain.”Autocracy by nature is exclusionary. It chokes off the life force that comes from working with other people.

here have been cracks in the CX story. And now there is another article by a CX proponent, Charles Bennett of the Next Ten Years, Great Customer Experience does not always mean great business performance.

He goes on to say:

“The theory says customer experience is proportional to revenue. At least that’s what “best practice” thinking has taught us. The better the customer experience the better the business result.

Really? Problem! This is not always true. There is new thinking emerging that differentiates customer outcomes from customer experience. It adds a new dimension which helps companies differentiate from their competitors.

It also explains why some great customer experience companies fall into decline and why some dreadful customer experience companies are massively profitable.”

He examples Spirit Airlines, which has terrible CX, and people say “never again” after traveling it. They rank at the bottom of the American Customer Satisfaction Index, the lowest Net Promoter Score and gain the greatest number of customer complaints, by far! And yet they are profitable, and people buy and travel them. (You could ask if NPS relates to business results!)

Spirit Airlines is amongst the most profitable airline in the world with an operating margin of 23% in 2016 . You can’t deliver that sort of business performance unless customers are buying, and buying they certainly are. There must be another customer dynamic going on.

Another example is Subway, ranked 8th in the Temkin Customer Experience Survey of 300 odd US companies. Yet their revenue figures fell 4.3% in 2015 for the second consecutive year. It opened 911 new restaurants but closed 877.

1. Doing it yourself. I’m not referring to doing it without a vendor; instead, I’m referring to keeping your journey mapping team too small. “Too many cooks in the kitchen” might be a bad way to make chili, but when it comes to journey mapping, nobody eats food that they didn’t help cook.

Okay, that metaphor didn’t work. Let’s try again.

Translated, if you do the journey mapping work yourself, and don’t involve your peers in the various silos, they have no reason to pay attention to the results. To drive customer-focused action, involve a broad team. Set expectations from the start that this is their project, too, and that not only will they own the insights – they’ll own the resulting actions, too.

2. Forgetting your customers. Too many “customer journey maps” are done internally. But you can’t have a customer journey map without involving customers! I like workshops as much as the next person. But a map created by employees is a Hypothesis Map, and nothing more.

We find that Hypothesis Maps typically cover 70-80% of information about the journey. But that remaining 20-30% is typically the most crucial information, typically explaining why a company is failing to engage customers.

Wisdom and humility are marks of a true leader, as is transparency. Accumulate enough scars, and there’s no sense trying to hide them. If you do, people will know you’re just covering up. That said, there’s a time and place for everything; you don’t want to bawl in front of the board of directors or blubber at an all-employee meeting. But don’t stuff the emotion. That’s where heart attacks come from.If you’re near tears, there’s a reason, and you need to find a healthy form of release. Leaders who don’t cry either have hearts of stone or are in denial. Neither is good. Get it out and you can get on with it.

When challenges arise, we need to make sure we do things for the sake of other people. It’s not just about me surviving the challenge -- everyone is trying to survive and overcome the challenge set before them. When times get tough, decisions are made that will affect people’s lives, plain and simple.When you start to affect people’s lives, you must ensure you’re compassionate with those decisions. How you communicate those decisions is extremely important. It’s not about what is comfortable for you, but how to ensure the best treatment for the other person.Open and transparent communication

As a servant leader, you owe it to your people to be visible to them and open to their input and feedback. Keep people up to speed on what is going on in your company, even when times are tough. If you don’t, the hall chatter begins and the rumor mill becomes toxic. Your people are the most important asset in your company. When there is little to no transparency, people wonder what you are hiding and start to question your key decisions and actions.When you are transparent with your employees, they understand where you and the company stand, which eliminates unnecessary speculation and gossip. Provide people with information, even if that information is difficult news to grasp. You will see the impact your authentic transparency makes in showing others your human-ness – which is much more relatable and credible than operating from a hiding place!“We are all living during a time when people want and expect their leaders to be more human, less perfect, and at times a bit vulnerable -- regardless of hierarchy or rank.” ~ Glenn Llopis

One of the best ways to instil confidence in potential customers is to get endorsements from premium clients – known businesses and enterprises whose name and logo are synonymous with success and quality. Yet, one of the main challenges for businesses in 2017 was finding and winning these clients.

Focus on promoting marketing material, ensure a strong SEO strategy so customers can find you using search engines, and make sure your website is attractive, mobile-friendly, and intuitive to navigate. Once you win your first business client, get their permission to use their logo and testimony on your site, social media and marketing material, so other customers will associate success and quality with your business services.

2. Choosing the right marketing strategy

Other than the look and feel of your store and website, businesses need to understand who their key customer is and how best to market to them. Normally, this takes time and money to research; something many new startups cannot afford to commit to with earnest.

Businesses are doubling down on IT outsourcing, according to a recent Computer Economics study that polled 131 IT organizations of various sizes and in a cross-section of industries about their outsourcing trends. But a closer look shows a more textured trend: Organizations aren't looking for new functions to outsource, but instead are tending to outsource more work in the areas in which they've already become accustomed to relying on third parties. If they do decide to outsource new functions, the focus tends to be on areas that require specialized skills. "Not surprisingly, IT security was the fastest growing function being outsourced," said David Wagner, vice president of research for Computer Economics. "The variety of threats and the danger they pose increase yearly. Finding and maintaining the right skills to meet these threats can be a challenge. Turning to experts to supplement internal IT security skills is a wise choice for most organizations." Wagner noted that outsourcing of other specialized functions, such as disaster recovery and network operations, is also growing. Meanwhile, application development remains the most oft-outsourced function and is most reflective of the study's major takeaway: While the percentage of companies outsourcing AppDev is shrinking, those who are outsourcing this function are planning to do more of it.

Regardless of your preference for one kind of feedback over another, and whether you want it or not, everyone receives feedback. The question that interested us was, does having a preference affect what you do with that feedback?

We combined the results from our self-assessment of feedback preferences with 360-degree evaluations of each leader’s effectiveness. The 360-degree assessment used was Zenger Folkman’s The Extraordinary Leader™ survey, which measures 16 competencies that are the key skills leaders need to transition from good managers to great leaders. Combining the data from both assessments gave us 588 leaders for whom we had responses for both assessments. We then broke the feedback preference data down into four groups. The table below shows each of the groups, and the percentage of population in each. (If you would like to take this feedback survey click here.)

The downside: Only 12 percent of Gen X’ers are “very confident” that they will be able to fully retire comfortably. It doesn’t help that many Gen X’ers find themselves straddling two costly responsibilities: raising kids and caring for aging parents.

The goal: Make a plan

The advice: “If you are a Gen X’er, take the time to sit down with a certified financial planner and make a plan for retirement, if you have not already done so. He or she can help you determine how much you should be saving and help you make up for any retirement shortfalls,” explains Brown.

“A certified financial planner can also help you change your plan if you need to take time out of the workforce to provide parenting or caregiving, or if you need to cut down to part-time work. Understand that working past age 65 may not be an option, as over half of Americans leave the workforce between age 61 and 65.”

3. The generation: Baby boomers

The downside: Many baby boomers were already mid-career when employers started adopting 401(k) plans, so they haven’t had as much time to save. Later access to 401(k) plans might also mean they’re adjusting to less stable retirement outlooks: “Traditional employer-sponsored pensions that pay a fixed benefit from retirement until death—once a mainstay for middle-class retirees—have been disappearing, replaced by 401(k)-type plans whose payout depends on unpredictable investment returns,” reports the Urban Institute.

Make eye contact. Avoiding eye contact altogether is a big temptation, and a big mistake. According to Psychology Today, “people who seek eye contact while speaking are regarded not only as exceptionally well-disposed by their targets, but also as more believable and earnest.” Take care to make eye contact with a few individuals in your audience, particularly those who appear in agreement with you. You can also pivot your body to face their direction.Assume a tall posture with your shoulders back to exude confidence. Create a presence on your stage. Simple tips, including standing in the centre, assuming a tall posture, pulling your shoulders back, and using the space given to you to move around in, all make an enormous difference. “Remember that status and authority are non-verbally demonstrated through height and space. So stand tall, pull your shoulders back, widen your stance, and hold your head high.”

Payroll eats up a large portion of any business’ expenses, so it is unsurprising to realize that some of the greatest contributions to profitability lie in employee retention, engagement and performance improvement. And yet, low engagement and high turnover runs rampant across industries, which is why 71% of employees are currently looking for another job.What does this look like when you walk into the average workplace?Depressed productivity: Stressed employees who work longer, produce less and feel undervalued.Greater conflict: Teams who spend more energy in unproductive coordination, conflict or conflict avoidance than in effective communication and collaboration.Missed customer opportunity: Employees who are not effective brand ambassadors and are unable to communicate business value when engaging with customers and potential recruits.

The simplest form this can take is that the work to be done outstrips the leader’s capacity. All of my clients work extraordinarily hard and are deeply committed to their professional roles—I describe them as "happy workaholics," an identity I share. But even their substantial capacity for work will eventually be insufficient to meet the organization’s needs, and this shift can happen surprisingly quickly. This is one of the "problems of success" that can catch leaders by surprise—they’re so focused on avoiding anticipated failures that they’re unprepared when things go well.

Leader as Unqualified Decision-Maker

This also occurs when the leader retains authority to make decisions even though they’re no longer the most-qualified decision-maker. In many cases the organization’s increasing size and complexity means that the information needed to support good decision-making is no longer centrally located but now resides at the margins. In the earliest stages of a company’s development, the leader may be the only person with access to this information because it can be found in their head and nowhere else, but eventually other pools of data are developed on employee performance, customer behavior, market opportunities, technical issues, and financial metrics. Even in situations where a leader can continue to add value through their unique perspective or intuition, an excessive dependence on centralized decision-making will result in slower response times and more mistakes.

Payroll eats up a large portion of any business’ expenses, so it is unsurprising to realize that some of the greatest contributions to profitability lie in employee retention, engagement and performance improvement. And yet, low engagement and high turnover runs rampant across industries, which is why 71% of employees are currently looking for another job.What does this look like when you walk into the average workplace?Depressed productivity: Stressed employees who work longer, produce less and feel undervalued.Greater conflict: Teams who spend more energy in unproductive coordination, conflict or conflict avoidance than in effective communication and collaboration.Missed customer opportunity: Employees who are not effective brand ambassadors and are unable to communicate business value when engaging with customers and potential recruits.Here’s an example. A middle-management client of mine, Marty, had taken the initiative to revise a key process in his division to achieve greater operational efficiency. After trying to ram it down his teams’ throats, they rebelled and complained to Marty’s boss, who recognized that Marty had unwittingly used divisional resources to pursue development funded elsewhere by corporate.

Sharing your scoops to your social media accounts is a must to distribute your curated content. Not only will it drive traffic and leads through your content, but it will help show your expertise with your followers.

Integrating your curated content to your website or blog will allow you to increase your website visitors’ engagement, boost SEO and acquire new visitors. By redirecting your social media traffic to your website, Scoop.it will also help you generate more qualified traffic and leads from your curation work.

Distributing your curated content through a newsletter is a great way to nurture and engage your email subscribers will developing your traffic and visibility.
Creating engaging newsletters with your curated content is really easy.